The hot gadget on the market today is the tablet computer, and in particular the Apple iPad 2. It offers up a color screen, touch interface, web access, thousands of apps, and the hardware to allow for video playback as well as letting you read e-books.

The other hot gadget being sold today is the e-reader, and in particular the Amazon Kindle. Both devices have their advantages, with the e-reader being setup for reading on a screen that’s very close to paper coupled with month-long battery life. But it is limited, and in many respects a tablet is the more versatile device.

One thing e-readers can’t do very well is video and animation playback. That’s because the e-paper displays they use have very slow refresh rates. However, that hasn’t stopped software developer Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell from creating a novel solution for allowing an e-reader to playback video footage.

The idea stems from the fact you don’t actually have to watch every frame of a video playback to understand what is happening. Instead, you can pull out frames of the video that are important to the content’s progression. That includes the frames visible when subtitles are displayed combined with “scene frames” which Mark explains is the “midpoint of each scene.” By combining the two you get a collection of scene images that when played in sequence give an accurate account of what is happening in any given video. You view the key actions and you read the subtitles to form an almost complete picture of what you’d get by watching the original video instead.

Mark has automated the system of scene picking and outputs the result to a HTML file. That file can also be converted to a PDF. The end result is your favorite TV shows or films being condensed down into a series of image files viewable on an e-reader as a PDF. Alternatively, there’s an embedable HTML player with controls for flicking between the images.

It’s not video playback in the true sense of the word, but on a limited device like an e-reader it’s about the best you are going to get at the moment. It’s also better than nothing at all if you can’t wait to wacth a video file and only have an e-reader to hand.

An example of the embedable video player can be viewed here and shows an episode of popular UK TV series Eastenders.

Mark intends to continue working on the system with the current plan being to take advantage of the audio description track videos have as well as improving his scene detection solution.